Winter Break
After the end of year holiday rush
When nothing is ever enough
No matter how much
You think you have given,
When innocence is negligence,
Extravagance forgets its shame
And the long con unravels
Into scraps of New Year’s Eve confetti,
We come to the southern beach
Ostensibly to be refreshed
By the predictable
Crashing of waves against a wet
Graveyard of broken bones, waves
That flatten like black tongues
And retreat with seized
Fragments of old shields
Ceded by soft bodies
Forever lost.
It’s too cold in January, even down
Here just north of the Tropic of Cancer.
We’re wearing sweaters and socks.
We shiver in the wind.
If you look straight ahead
Your eyes alight on the zenith
Of a parabolic horizon
Separating sky from sea.
From there it’s a straight line
As the murderous gull flies
To the back wall of a panic room
Hidden in the thalamus of my brain.
In truth, all lines end here—
An infinite regression
Of staggering complexity
Boomeranging back to a pinpoint
Singularity seen only once, one time,
By a single person, standing alone,
Probably somewhere dumb.
There’s nothing regenerative here,
Don’t let the surf fool you.
It isn’t the same wave cyclically
Renewing itself
Crest after trough
Over and over until you’re gone
Like some old poem
that turned into a cliché.
No, it’s a single wave collapsing
One time
Never to arch its back and rush
Headlong for shore ever again.
One bundle of coursing energy
Ending in a froth of disconsolate fury.
I am not reborn
Again, nor is the ocean.
Which is both the lesson
And the source
Of the great relaxation—
That something so small,
Light as a tern,
On the edge of the vast
Could be both creator and sole curator
Of an otherwise unknown universe.
Wife and kids are nearby
Attending to other things on the beach:
Soccer balls and shells. Selfies with sandpipers
Someone watching us from the dunes
Would say: now there’s a man who isn’t alone
But there is a difference between there and here.
As vast as the ocean sprawled out before me
As small as the shadows we cast on the winter sand.
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